Admirers of H.P. Lovecraft’s classic supernatural tales will find much of interest in this intricately contrived horror story. The protagonist, Ned Dunstan, a computer programmer whose 35th birthday is fast approaching, in fact “enters” a world specifically inspired by Lovecraft’s demon-infested “Cthulha Mythos” as he returns to his Illinois hometown for the funeral of his mother Valerie (a.k.a. “Star,” an itinerant jazz singer whose rootless life made her almost as much a stranger to Ned as was the father he never knew). Almost immediately, inexplicable things begin to happen: Ned is accused of crimes he couldn’t possibly have committed; the dream that has troubled him since childhood—of his shadow pursuing and threatening him—edges ever closer to reality; and reunions with his Illinois relatives turn up evidence that he may have been the son of Edward Rinehart, a mad writer of supernatural fiction himself descended from a family cursed for its dalliance in slave-trading and witchcraft. Straub (The Hellfire Club, 1996, etc.) pulls several tangled narrative strings adroitly, as Ned discovers his facility for levitation and time travel, among other dark arts. Intermittent chapters presented from the viewpoint of the self-styled “Mr. X” offer teasing glimpses of the truths Ned labors to uncover, as the story moves right along, lifting plot elements here and there from Stephen King and Shirley Jackson as well as Lovecraft—and, incidentally, featuring several dead-on parodies of the latter’s notoriously purplish prose. Twins separated at birth, antiquarians and poltergeists, a plucky love interest whose own family harbors dark secrets, a fiery climax straight out of the early Frankenstein movies, and a denouement offering no fewer than three turns of the screw: Straub doesn’t miss a trick, or omit a clichÇ peculiar to the genre. Overlong and sometimes embarrassingly lurid, though more often than not quite entertaining. Not by any means Straub’s most accomplished work, but one of his more interesting recent books all the same. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-40138-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
IN THE NEWS
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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